Did Bigger Penises Evolve to Protect Hermit Crabs’ Private Property?

Sex, economics, evolution, and stuckness all play roles in this new study about the evolution of larger penises in hermit crabs: “Private parts for private property: evolution of penis size with more valuable, easily stolen shells,” Mark E. Laidre, Royal Society Open Science, epub 2019. (Thanks to Thomas Michel for bringing this to our attention.) […]

A Biological Switching Valve Discovered in the Famous Sex-Role Reversed Cave Insect

The team that won the 2017 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for discovering a female penis, and a male vagina, in a cave insect has published a new paper, reporting a further discovery about the body parts of that insect. Their new paper is “A Biological Switching Valve Evolved in the Female of a Sex-Role Reversed […]

A look back at the Penises of the Animal Kingdom poster

Colin Dickey, writing in Topic magazine, explores the history of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning poster “Penises of the Animal Kingdom” and its creator, Jim Knowlton. Dickey’s report bears the headline “The Penis Poster That Rubbed People the Wrong Way“: “… Knowlton had been a graduate student at Columbia University, working on a PhD in particle […]

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